Top mods - Neverwinter Nights

Tweaking for performance

Adding content to any game is going to be at best moderately dicey and Neverwinter Nights is no exception. Be sure when playing online that your game matches the version your server is running, this is vital as you cannot unpatch NWN once it has been patched and this can cause you to need a reinstall. Sometimes a new patch will force a multiplayer server to be taken down for retooling and this is not always a simple task, especially as most persistent worlds are hugely laden with custom scripts that might need to be fixed or content that needs to be overhauled or replaced.

A second worry to NWN users is that even if adding all this content doesn't just out and out break your install of Neverwinter Nights there is a real chance you'll take a performance hit, especially if you've just slapped in a gigabytes worth of modules and hak pack files. The single most effective measure if you do notice some post modding slowdown in this regard, especially if youíve added a lot of files, is to defragment your hard disk. Neverwinter Nights uses a lot of files and if it can't get to them quickly because they are in bits all over the drive you can bet this will have a serious impact on performance.

If you should manage to play through all the single player campaigns, the best of the best of the player built content and play enough online multiplayer games so that you're completely sick of the sight of other peoples dwarves, there is always the option to build your own modules. The Bioware site offers tutorials on how to use the Aurora toolset, how to build and balance your own creatures with those already in the game and everything you could need to know to set up quests and scripts to control AI behaviour. For anything that these tutorials miss there are the forums which are active and populated by experienced and well informed builders, many of who have been churning out modules for years.

It is a testament to how well Neverwinter Nights managed to implement the tried and tested Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition rules set into a computer game that it is still around and going strong to this day. With the sequel on the way and promising much the same in terms of the toolset and flexibility we can only watch and wonder what the future will hold for the franchise.